Coloring Tamara the Ballerina in Krita

First up, happy June, happy Pride, happy end of the school year! I'm SO ready to be "Summer Mom". Summer Mom does not set an alarm. Summer Mom goes to the lake and the ocean and the museums. Summer Mom plans fun activities and random lunches. Summer Mom is GREAT, for all of us. Things will be a little bit different this year. My oldest got his very first summer job. He's already started working on the weekends and seems to be enjoying it. Next year my youngest will be old enough to join him. That will be a whole new experience for all of us! I'm less in the "existential dread" phase of parenting now. Last year was tough on me and last summer felt like an ominous LAST SUMMER. This year, not so much. My kids are good people. What more can I ask for?! (I mean, taking care of their own dishes would be great...)

This week, while the kids are still in school, I decided to jump into Krita. If you didn't see it last week, I tested out a feature in Krita where I easily extracted the line art from from an image. I was VERY impressed. Sometimes free or open source or cheap software is, well, not great. I was so impressed with the line art extraction that I decided to color the whole page in Krita.

I wanted to try Krita because it's open source. One of my core beliefs about art is that it's ALWAYS accessible. All you really need is a way to make marks and a surface to place those marks. That's it. Paper and pencil - great. Paint and canvas - also great. Tablet and software - find a price point that works for you and go for it. Most of us have some kind of computing device at this point. I work on a refurbished iPad Pro, an XP-Pen Artist Pro 24 inch monitor on a gaming PC, and, lest we forget, a very expensive and stupid all-apps Adobe subscription. That's my setup today but I've worked with a lot less in the past.

And you can, too. 

This is where I left off last week. I had Tamara the Ballerina from Paperdoll Review ready to color. Line art on one layer, ready to go. I'll admit to a bit of a learning curve with Krita. It's a bit different than Photoshop or Procreate, or other drawing software that I've used. Not TOO different but enough. I played around with it for 15 minutes or so, just to get a feel for it. I stuck to default brushes and colors for this run-through.

I tinkered with the workspace a bit until I found a configuration I was happy with. I like my swatches and brushes on the left and my layers on the right. I don't know why. I just do! I also started closing panels that I didn't need in the right-hand side of the screen. The color palette that I used is the Concept Cookie swatches but there are other palettes available. Brushes are awesome! There are loads of default brushes and I just kept playing with them until I found ones I sort of liked. None of the default brushes felt quite like the ones I use in Procreate or Sketchbook Pro but they were nice regardless. I found myself blending which isn't normally something I do and I'm not crazy about it.

This is a fault with me, not Krita. I'm sure I could replicate my workflow using either default tools or community tools. There's a thriving Krita community worth checking out.

 

Here's a close-up of my unblended colors. Once I did blend them they were a bit too smooth. That got better as I continued to try other tools. 

Here's the doll, colored and blended. I redrew the lips on a layer above the line art. Black lips bother me! 

At first, Krita felt kind of meh. The rotation dials on my monitor didn't work. Almost all of the shortcuts were different but also logical so that was ok. The eyedropper/color picker is P instead of I. The bucket fill is F instead of G. And so on. Also, I had to dig for a few things, like the hue/saturation. Once I found it, it was great and worked well. This wasn't a Photoshop or Procreate replacement. 

The game changer, though, was accidentally right-clicking on my mouse.

I'm kind of retro - I like having a keyboard and mouse along with my drawing tablet. I rarely use the buttons on my stylus, whether it's on my PC or on my iPad. So while I was scrolling along, I accidentally right-clicked and this fantastic wheel popped up. I have never seen anything like this! 

Here's an image from the Krita user manual showing all of the details. The manual has a whole section about using Krita after using other software, like Photoshop. It's great! 

This little wheel does everything! Wanna rotate your canvas? Drag the little slider at the top. Toggle colors - that's tucked into the back. A mini color picker wheel, color history, favorite (or recent? I'm not sure) brushes....this thing had it ALL! The only thing I couldn't really do from here was set the blend mode of my brushes and that was barely an issue. Once I found this, my whole workflow sped up significantly!

And if that wasn't enough, there are also vector tools for adding tabs! I didn't use that this time. I will in the future.  

 So the TL;DR on Krita:

 Pros:

• Great default color palettes
• A nice variety of interesting brushes
• Straightforward and customizable interface with more tools than I'll ever need! 
• Easily extract line art onto a transparent background
• Vector tools
• Broad compatibility, available on Windows, Mac, Linux, and there might be a clunky Android port although it isn't available for iPad so that might be a con for some 
• POP-UP PALETTE! 
• PRICE is FREE!  

Cons (all very minor):

• Shortcuts are different if you've used other software, like Photoshop. Easy to figure out and re-learn
• Large, many-paneled interface can be a bit confusing but adapts with ease
• Adjustments are under the Filters menu and tools in general might not be where you would expect them to be
• Vector tools are not exactly intuitive and I need to experiment with that some more 

This is really the first open source art software that I can see myself really getting into. If you have a Mac or PC and a drawing tablet of any sort, check it out. If you do try it, let me know what you think!